- Jun 18, 2013
- 2
- 0
- 10,510
I have a gateway sx2110g was purchased for my church with win 8 x64. I want to install win 7 ultimate x64 removing win 8 (drivers are available) and creating a system image on a separate partition that I create. I want to maintain the ability to go back to factory and this can be achieved by copying recovery partition to flash drive which it will make a bootable recovery environment. (PE) Of course doing this will remove any traces of my win 7 installation and partition customizations.
Now you know what I am going to do with the PC here is the trick... The Win 8 bootable recovery partition USB drive has enough space to accommodate the win 7 bootable repair disk ISO. What I want to do is shrink the Win 8 repair partition (1) on the USB create a new partition (2) and apply the win 7 ISO. Then when I boot from the USB HDD I get a boot menu to select Win 8 or Win 7 repair environments.
Here is my purposed path to accomplish this...
1. Create Win 8 recovery partition bootable USB flash drive.
2. Insert the flash drive in to another computer and use Partition Wizard to shrink partition (1) and create new partition (2) 0x07 (NTFS) with drive letter assignment. (Y)
3. Mount Win 7 repair disk ISO and use Imagex (AIK Tools) to capture (imagex /capture /boot /compress fast D:\w7rep\w7rep.wim) file and then apply (imagex /apply D:\w7rep\w7rep.wim 1 Y:\) it to the new partition on the USB drive. (I am not sure if this will maintain boot ability)
4. Modify bootmgr on USB win 8 Recovery partition to include the Win 7 repair partition on the USB flash drive. This I don't know how to do, may be use bcd edit?
Let me know what you think, Thanks
Harry
Now you know what I am going to do with the PC here is the trick... The Win 8 bootable recovery partition USB drive has enough space to accommodate the win 7 bootable repair disk ISO. What I want to do is shrink the Win 8 repair partition (1) on the USB create a new partition (2) and apply the win 7 ISO. Then when I boot from the USB HDD I get a boot menu to select Win 8 or Win 7 repair environments.
Here is my purposed path to accomplish this...
1. Create Win 8 recovery partition bootable USB flash drive.
2. Insert the flash drive in to another computer and use Partition Wizard to shrink partition (1) and create new partition (2) 0x07 (NTFS) with drive letter assignment. (Y)
3. Mount Win 7 repair disk ISO and use Imagex (AIK Tools) to capture (imagex /capture /boot /compress fast D:\w7rep\w7rep.wim) file and then apply (imagex /apply D:\w7rep\w7rep.wim 1 Y:\) it to the new partition on the USB drive. (I am not sure if this will maintain boot ability)
4. Modify bootmgr on USB win 8 Recovery partition to include the Win 7 repair partition on the USB flash drive. This I don't know how to do, may be use bcd edit?
Let me know what you think, Thanks
Harry
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